Engaging Children and Young People in the Co-Production of Memory and Culture through Multimodal Ethnographic Research

Abstract:Despite the changing perception of children's role in public discourse and the acknowledgement of their right to both agency and participation, the persistent marginalization of children's views and experiences in the making of public memory and culture needs to be further addressed across disciplinary boundaries. Drawing on research from childhood and memory studies, this article explores how multimodal ethnographic experimentations can be used to invite children and young people to be research partners and co-creators of public memory and culture about the things that concern them. I discuss the Connectors Study, and the Children's Photography Archive, as an illustrative case example of engaging children in cultural work through research and draw on the premises within this study to suggest an experimental methodology that invites school students as co-creators of educational memory. I argue for an explicit use of multimodality as a research practice that mediates and facilitates children and young people's memory-making in the present, while creating a framework that recognizes them as co-creators of culture and public memory-making.